Hm, i115 Nexus upgrade has me worried for Third Coil.

[Krr]

Please, please, please... TELL me how it's more difficult? You grind. No, really, that's ALL you do for a relic. Grind. That's not difficulty. You don't have to learn anything or learn to work with a group or any of that at all, to get a relic.

So, again, please tell me how mindless grinding, yes it's pretty much mindless, is harder than coil?

If we look at the accumulation of gear as an investment of labor and an investment of play-labor as a measure of difficulty, this post gets too long to make without post-post-editing. Thankfully, I hit the edit button. Anyway, an HA (or coil weapon in general) requires the following:

*The pre-requisite labor to participate in Coil at all, including grinding tomestones, ST, and Hunting for roughly i100-i105 (a general expectation of most existing Coil statics)
*The pre-requisite labor of finding a Coil static, which usually involves some length of wait time and socializing (essentially, social skill and labor)
*Fairly high input of long-run time. You will probably have to run Coil for several weeks or months before you see the weapon you need, and that's before long-term weeks spent farming the instance.
*Fairly low real play time. Once you have Coil down, you can do a full run in 2-3 hours. Honestly, most experienced groups these days can teach a new player to down a turn in 2-3 hours as well. Obviously, the amount of this play time you have to dedicate decreases with how far you are from the content coming out; newer content is impossible to 'teach' and can only be learned by everyone in a slow, grueling process. This matches the general deprecation of the value of item levels in the game as a whole.
*Higher Personal skill in a job and coordinative/communicative skill in a team than any other content in the game.

To take a relic from Zenith all the way up to Novus, you need the following:
*30-40 hours, on average, of low-skill play/labor to accumulate 12 Atmas.
*15,000 Mythology tomestones. Acquiring these tomestones requires some amount of skill at a basic level as you need to be able to run dungeons. The process of acquiring this rewards a sort of meta-play skill in being able to plan your approach as to how you'll acquire these tomes efficiently, either through Hunting, speedruns, or other means. Players not skilled in this form of time management will have slowly made and thus low-value relics.
*9 Novus books, which involve killing 900 mobs, clearing 27 dungeons no harder than Lost City of Amdapor, and 27 FATE events. Again, there is a meta-skill element of personal planning to reduce downtime and increase the efficiency of doing this that often goes unignored. It is a (relatively) momumental task that will be done slowly if at all without the proper rigor and commitment - sound familiar? Players with learned familiarity in the game world will complete these tasks faster than others.
*The acquisition of 75 Alexandrite. Alexandrite is a pseudo-daily resource that also has multiple alternative means for acquisition, so collecting the pre-requisite alexandrite efficiently requires even more pre-planning and commitment to reduce downtime not spent getting Alexandrite. And then...
*The acquisition of 75 Materia of various grades. This requires, yet again, meta-skill, and possibly more than any other step in the process.

In order to maximize one worst-case stat, your best case will be to spend 3,600,000 Gil worth of materia on it. Sometimes more. How will you acquire this gil? Simply 'grinding' for it will take weeks or months to fully flesh out the weapon...unless you have an understanding of the market. And every player's interaction with the game market is different, or dynamic even - are you a crafter? Is your crafting relevant? If it's not, or you aren't, is it cost-effective to purchase and spiritbond gear? This happens at a cost and is highly random. What about other methods of generating money, and thus materia?

I dislike the notion that creating a Relic is a robotic, mindless, lone act. Many steps of the process are very inefficient without good coordination with other players. A server incapable of organizing hunts is going to cost you a lot of Alex/Book tomes. A group that can't speedrun is going to make your myth-gathering process 3-4x slower. Many other steps of the process are hellishly inefficient done without a proper attack plan set up. In general, if you don't show a high level of commitment to both doing and making the process efficient, you end up wasting a lot of time on a piece of crap that's already outdated with the next patch.

If we look at all weapon acquisition as a fact of labor input to item received, let's be honest - upgrading your relic is a fun vanity quest or a last-resort effort, even if these theoretical on-par-with-final-turn weapons are available.

I guess you can say that every player can eventually get a Novus or Nexus or Orgasmic or whatever weapon given an infinite amount of mindless grind, but then they're behind the curve and who even gives a damn?

[Numenor1379]

Yes, because everyone who does T9, pays for it. Please, try again.

I'm not saying that they do, only that it IS done. So again, how is beating ONE single boss (the fight which can be completed in 10min or less) any more difficult than spending hundreds of hours doing the Relic Quest chain? Time spent on the Relic quest far dwarfs learning T9, it's time for the weapons to reflect that. Thankfully it appears the Relic weapons are starting to be equalized to the raid drops.

[hallena]

Please, please, please... TELL me how it's more difficult? You grind. No, really, that's ALL you do for a relic. Grind. That's not difficulty. You don't have to learn anything or learn to work with a group or any of that at all, to get a relic.

So, again, please tell me how mindless grinding, yes it's pretty much mindless, is harder than coil?

The current novus require a pretty heavy grind. To grind you need patience and perseverance. Those 2 things being skills. The most skilled player in the world might never see his allagan weapon drop because lolrng so an alternative would be nice.
HOWEVER what they should've done is add a drop to T9 for everyone that completeted it to upgrade relic to allagan weapon tier

[wicked-one]

Get ready to do a ton of low level dungeons and main scenario quests! SE said they were looking into a way to get players doing them more since new players are facing terrible queue times. Wouldn't be surprised if this is their answer.

Jeah, that´s what im concerned about. Another massive Timesink in down-synced content. Back to that feeling of work instead of fun and playing... and that for a +5 on iLvl...

really courious about that, but expecting the worst...

[VicViperion]

Yes, because everyone who does T9, pays for it. Please, try again.



Stop ignoring the work that went into learning the turns and getting to T9 in the first place. It's the same pit everyone falls into.

Just like you're ignoring the work, and hours of tedious grind it takes to get the Relic to it's maxed out state? And what work in "learning the turns"? Theres walkthroughs for every. Single. Thing. That is released in a game, in under a week of release. And given all the fights follow the exact same sequence, every single time, with absolutely NO variation beyond who is randomly targetted by X move in certain cases, you shouldn't be failing. You're literally playing Simon Says with the game by running Coil. That certainly shouldn't be rewarded by handing out better upgrades than hours of dedicated grind and a mountain of gil.

[ispano]

I'm not saying that they do, only that it IS done. So again, how is beating ONE single boss (the fight which can be completed in 10min or less) any more difficult than spending hundreds of hours doing the Relic Quest chain? Time spent on the Relic quest far dwarfs learning T9, it's time for the weapons to reflect that. Thankfully it appears the Relic weapons are starting to be equalized to the raid drops.

Please, no really, try again. Just because that one person got carried, doesn't mean the other 7 didn't have to progress and learn the content. They put actual work in getting to where they are. You are missing that aspect of it.

[ispano]

The current novus require a pretty heavy grind. To grind you need patience and perseverance. Those 2 things being skills. The most skilled player in the world might never see his allagan weapon drop because lolrng so an alternative would be nice.
HOWEVER what they should've done is add a drop to T9 for everyone that completeted it to upgrade relic to allagan weapon tier i8nstead of adding allagan weapon at all

Most people doing coil would have no issue with the bolded.

[Ginga_K]

With this upgrades, it prepares all for the next difficult content?
Sands/oil available thru many means.

Same ilvl wpn as t9 with different stats.... lolx

Wats goin to happen to e game?

[hallena]

Most people doing coil would have no issue with the bolded.

that would be the point. Those who dont do coil have relic/tomestones weapons. Those who are skilled enough to do T9 get the next relic tier

[Miunih]

stuff.

Cause people who beat these fights, especially the first few which myself is included, learn the fight from the ground up, not from a video. The amount of hours into just learning the fight without videos is.. frankly insane, keep in mind that at that time we weren't even remotely near being full 110, if anyone was i100.. it was a small miracle.
To those who indeed watched a video to learn the mechanics and not discover them for themselves still spend hours and hours into it, the dps check, healing checks, cooldown rotations, remembering all the phases and most importantly; not fucking up a single mechanics. This takes ages, especially with 7 other people, learning takes time, more time then to sit behind your pc hunting atmas while watching a movie.

In the meanwhile, I'll be using me four special Savage Coil titles to seperate myself from the people who wear their welfare i110 gear and their mindlessly grinded 115 weapon.